By: Brandon Wolfe
The time jump has become an increasingly popular trope for television shows to play around with, and it’s not difficult to see why. It basically affords a series the opportunity for a mid-course reboot, a way to shake off the staleness and bring in the new without scrapping everything or glacially building toward eventual change. By leaping forward in time, a familiar world suddenly becomes a strange new land where all bets are off, where all your favorite characters that you know so well now require catching up on. Shows usually pull this rabbit out of their hat for a season-finale cliffhanger, as NBC’s ‘Parks and Recreation’ did recently with its three-year fast-forward. That or they will introduce a shift in time between seasons, as ‘24’ always did. But ‘Fargo’ likes to go its own way, so when it drops a full-year leap ahead into its narrative, it does so halfway through the eighth episode of the season. Way to keep us on our toes.
But before ‘Fargo’ takes us into the future (well, into 2007, technically), it gets us caught up with the present (2006) by showing us that beating a murder rap and destroying his family was the best thing for Lester, really. The previously pathetic sad-sack is sprucing up his old home with a fancy new washing machine, and that’s just the first and least significant of the changes in Lester’s life. Everything Lester has perpetrated and somehow withstood has led to his surprising discovery of his backbone. Now he’s putting the widow Hess in her place when she threatens him, fends off her rabid sons with a stapler and charms the pants off a fetching co-worker. When Molly walks by Lester’s office window one snowy night, she sees him holding court with his fellow employees like he runs the place. By all indications, Lester has won.
It’s something Molly has an impossible time trying to shake. She still lobbies to Bill (Bob Odenkirk) to keep the investigation open, pointing to the elaborate wall map of suspects and timelines she has created to illustrate how none of this adds up, but he just wants it all put to bed. Molly’s tenacity won’t let her off the hook so easily, but she has found something else to focus her attention on in Gus, who is clearly very interested in her, even if his sheepishness as a suitor means that she needs to take charge for anything to happen. But she does, and there seems to be a spark forming.
Then we jaunt ahead in time to find that a lot has happened to these two since the awkward date arrangement where we left them just moments ago. Molly and Gus are married, Molly is pregnant and Gus is now the postman he always wanted to be. The two, along with Gus’ daughter Greta (Joey King), have settled into a happy family life. Everything seems blissful and wonderful until we see that Molly still has that tangled timeline of events on her wall. Though her life has come together in so many ways over this past year, Molly still can’t get that splinter out of her brain. Meanwhile, Lester is in Vegas being named Salesman of the Year at an insurance conference. He’s now married to that co-worker he so impressed a year earlier, yet in light of his newfound confidence, he still scans the room for other attractive dalliances. While making eye contact with a pretty young thing at the hotel bar, he spots something else that just about knocks him off his barstool: Lorne Malvo, the man who set off the chain of events that changed Lester’s life. Malvo, from what we see, might have changed the most of everyone this past year. Now white-haired and well-dressed, he is smiling and laughing as he entertains a table full of people, a far cry from the laconic lone-wolf we knew. The question we end on is if Lester will feel the need to make contact with the awful genie that granted all his wishes.
The flash-forward was a pleasant surprise in ‘The Heap’, and wholly unexpected. The greatest joy comes from the revelation that Molly and Gus did indeed wind up together, even if that does make us wince at the thought of how much there now is to lose when Malvo re-enters the picture. Molly now being pregnant casts into sharper focus the spiritual parallel that exists between she and the film’s Marge Gunderson. It’s also very entertaining to witness a version of Lester that isn’t afraid of his own shadow. One would almost have to give the guy credit for his incredible personal overhaul were it at all possible to turn a blind eye to what he did to get there.
The only characters who didn’t see a great deal of change over the past year are FBI agents Budge and Pepper, played by comedy duo Key and Peele. Introduced last week seemingly for a jokey one-off cameo where they were asleep at the wheel when Malvo took out a whole building full of criminals with an assault rifle, they are back this week and bound to a file room indefinitely by their superior as penance for their ineptitude. It’s still not clear how these two will fit into the narrative overall, but their focus on a photograph of Malvo (who seems to leave behind far too much photographic evidence of himself to remain in the shadows as well as he does) pinned to the file room wall seems to indicate that they will have a substantial role in the season’s endgame.
‘Fargo’ has become one of the greater surprises in recent TV memory and it continues to surprise us from week to week. The 2007 timeline finds all of its principals in happier places than we left them prior (although who can honestly tell with Malvo?), but that is certainly all coming to a close when these people return to each other’s orbits. Lester seems primed for a major fall, but who knows if the show will give it to him. Its unpredictability is as bracing as a cold Minnesota winter.
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